The present invention relates to an interactive audio-visual work, and more particularly to such apparatus for use in conjunction with a book having intermixed text and symbols.
In the field of interactive children's books which are equipped with supplementary electronic devices, the combination of a book and an associated prerecorded audio tape or audio record has been the earliest and most popular product. Such systems have been successful children's products for over a decade. The objective of these products is to introduce young children to reading and to encourage older children to improve their reading skills, while employing some form of interactivity to make achieving these reading-skill goals both more pleasurable and self-motivating.
More recently, children's books have become available which contain integral electronic devices capable of producing sounds that had been stored in a digital memory within the device during the manufacturing process, either as digitally recorded or synthesized sound. Examples of such books are the SIGHT-N-SOUND books published by Western Publishing and widely available in toy stores and at other merchandisers in the United States and elsewhere. In these books, an electronic device is attached to the back cover. This device allows the reader to press any one of several touchbutton switch areas located on the device, which in turn results in the production of a particular prestored sound, such as that of a human voice, an animal sound, musical instrument sounds and the like. When the child reads the book or has the book read to him or her, graphics or colored indications within the text direct the reader to press similarly identified or colored touchbuttons on the device; thereby to reproduce an appropriate, prestored sound to enliven and otherwise enhance the process of reading the book. This specific product has had substantial commercial success as a result of its realistic reproduction of the stored sounds and its relatively low cost, due to the use of low-cost speech synthesizer integrated circuits with low data-storage requirements per second of sound delivered.
None of the aforementioned electronically-enhanced interactive children's books have as yet had the capability to allow the recording of the reader's voice or reader's selection of these recorded sounds for later playback during the reading of a book, let alone the capability of varying the pitch of the sound being played back or randomizing the response, despite the well-recognized fact that children like to hear their own voices.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide apparatus for use in conjunction with a book which enables sounds produced by the user (such as his voice) to be recorded prior to reading the book so that the recorded sound segments can later be called up selectively and played back during the reading of the book.
Another object is to provide such apparatus herein the previously recorded sounds stored in the apparatus may be altered in pitch or volume when played back.
A further object is to provide such apparatus wherein the previously recorded sounds stored in the apparatus may be played back in a different order from that in which they were recorded and stored.
It is also an object of the present invention to provide such apparatus which enables the previously recorded sounds stored in the apparatus according to certain logic rules to be played back in response to different logic rules.